Abby Frucht's Blog
May 15, 2013
Tangled up in Blue, or, lines found in house
This one kills me, the thought of waiting a year between hearing of or from your loved ones: more from Edward Beauclerk Maurice's The Last Gentleman Adventurer, Coming of Age in the Arctic: :I had lost track of the days during our expedition. Somehow it had not seemed to be of any importance what day it was. I was pleased to discover on our return from the hunting trip that it was a Saturday night, and though this did not have the same significance up north as in less remote spots, it was special in one way. The Canadian broadcasting authorities used the CKY Winnipeg station...to relay messages from friends and relations in the outside world to the men and women of the Arctic....I once got a message through from my mother, who had left for New Zealand during the autumn after my departure, to say that they were safe and well after a severe earthquake. This I heard quite clearly, although I had not known about the disaster. Had it not been for Alan's patient determination with this infuriating piece of equipment, we should have heard nothing at all.
May 7, 2013
observation post, true or false
The short story writer writes the story, but the essay writer is written by the essay.
April 27, 2013
review from Serving House Journal of The Bell at the End of a Rope
The Bell at the End of a Rope
by Abby Frucht
Reviewed by Walter Cummins
Narrative Library
(June 2012)
See also Amazon
One of the pleasures of reading an Abby Frucht story in her latest collection, The Bell at the End of a Rope, is the surprise that comes when the actual point of the piece is revealed, a tension subtly prepared for but not disclosed until the end. As a reader you think the issue of the plot is clear as you find yourself immersed in a unique world of quirky characters animated through details so complete and compelling that you have no inclination to look for more; you’re satisfied with the rich invention that appears to advance the drama behind the actions of the characters. But that isn’t really it.
The great majority of short stories establish the issues faced by one or sometimes more characters early on and follow through until the climax. These Abby Frucht stories don’t work that way. The real concern slips in sideways, ultimately there, even though the ongoing happenings seem to be about something else.
It’s not a literary trick played by the author on the reader. Rather it’s the characters who miss the point, obsessed with immediate concerns they assume are their life’s dilemmas, not the more fundamental crises they have failed to recognize.
Take “Erasures,” a story that first appeared in this publication [Issue 2, Fall 2010]. It opens with this sentence: “Only when Sandra is passing through security this morning...does she discover he has finally stolen her wallet.” The “he” isn’t identified as her son till later in the first paragraph. But only when she gets to the airplane’s boarding gate does she realize the boy has also stolen her briefcase and her laptop. It turns out that she is a poet flying to an interview for a teaching position and that the poems she planned to read and the notes for the seminar she is to lead are gone. How to cope without this crucial material appears to be her problem.
One doesn’t have to be a poet or an academic to empathize. But we learn in the same paragraph that Sandra has published the same book of poems three times under three titles from three different presses. Even though they are identical, except for the title, she considers them her three books and hasn’t even started her “fourth,” which she is supposed to read from that evening. To complicate matters further, the son has stolen her eyeglasses. There, in an apparent aside, the reader is told: “She imagines the glasses sightless in a drawer of the dresser in his dad’s big house on Bowen Street, filled with clothes the boy won’t wear. He’s not a bad man, her ex, and she had never meant to hurt him. He simply doesn’t have a clue what clothes to buy.”
Phone calls to her son and her ex go unanswered, but Sandra manages to bluff through her performances by reading from a book by an “up-and-coming poet” discovered in her dorm room. Squinting at the page, she passes off the poems as her own and receives an ovation. For the seminar, she uses the game of erasures, the story’s title, by having students take a paper from their backpacks and delete words and phrases. What’s left is a kind of found poem. Sandra thinks of them as “sly alternatives” to the pages in question.
When she returns home, she goes to her ex’s house on Bowen Street to retrieve her son. She unlocks the door and finds the house empty, barren of furniture, including the dresser with the clothes the boy won’t wear. The only thing left is her laptop with a message on it from her ex: “I DO MEAN TO HURT YOU.”
For many writers, that irony might serve as the last line of the story, the vacant house a twist on all the stealing that has taken place, the word “hurt” a revelation of Sandra’s obtuseness in thinking she has not meant to hurt her husband and son. But Frucht takes that irony a step further, with Sandra staring myopically at the line as if it is a poem: “Even blind she can tell it’s not such a great poem.” In the final sentence she deletes it.
Until the concluding paragraphs, the story appeared to be about a woman overcoming logistical handicaps, but the real issue of the piece is Sandra’s blindness to her own life and all the meaning she has erased.
“Erasures” is symptomatic of the stories in The Bell at the End of a Rope, unsettling because their edge suggests something is very wrong beyond what the characters think is wrong. They are missing the true danger, the dysfunction, madness, death, and even murder that lurk beneath the surface. These revelations and the various ways the stories get to them make this a unique and distinctive collection.
SHJ Issue 7
Spring 2013
Walter Cummins
is the co-publisher of Serving House Books and a faculty member in Fairleigh Dickinson University’s MFA in Creative Writing Program. His most recent short story collection, The End of the Circle, was published in 2010.
Cummins has published more than 100 stories in such magazines as Kansas Quarterly, Other Voices, Crosscurrents, Florida Review, South Carolina Review, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Virginia Quarterly Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Arabesques, and Confrontation, and on the Internet. He also has published memoirs, essays, articles, and reviews.
by Abby Frucht
Reviewed by Walter Cummins
Narrative Library
(June 2012)
See also Amazon
One of the pleasures of reading an Abby Frucht story in her latest collection, The Bell at the End of a Rope, is the surprise that comes when the actual point of the piece is revealed, a tension subtly prepared for but not disclosed until the end. As a reader you think the issue of the plot is clear as you find yourself immersed in a unique world of quirky characters animated through details so complete and compelling that you have no inclination to look for more; you’re satisfied with the rich invention that appears to advance the drama behind the actions of the characters. But that isn’t really it.
The great majority of short stories establish the issues faced by one or sometimes more characters early on and follow through until the climax. These Abby Frucht stories don’t work that way. The real concern slips in sideways, ultimately there, even though the ongoing happenings seem to be about something else.
It’s not a literary trick played by the author on the reader. Rather it’s the characters who miss the point, obsessed with immediate concerns they assume are their life’s dilemmas, not the more fundamental crises they have failed to recognize.
Take “Erasures,” a story that first appeared in this publication [Issue 2, Fall 2010]. It opens with this sentence: “Only when Sandra is passing through security this morning...does she discover he has finally stolen her wallet.” The “he” isn’t identified as her son till later in the first paragraph. But only when she gets to the airplane’s boarding gate does she realize the boy has also stolen her briefcase and her laptop. It turns out that she is a poet flying to an interview for a teaching position and that the poems she planned to read and the notes for the seminar she is to lead are gone. How to cope without this crucial material appears to be her problem.
One doesn’t have to be a poet or an academic to empathize. But we learn in the same paragraph that Sandra has published the same book of poems three times under three titles from three different presses. Even though they are identical, except for the title, she considers them her three books and hasn’t even started her “fourth,” which she is supposed to read from that evening. To complicate matters further, the son has stolen her eyeglasses. There, in an apparent aside, the reader is told: “She imagines the glasses sightless in a drawer of the dresser in his dad’s big house on Bowen Street, filled with clothes the boy won’t wear. He’s not a bad man, her ex, and she had never meant to hurt him. He simply doesn’t have a clue what clothes to buy.”
Phone calls to her son and her ex go unanswered, but Sandra manages to bluff through her performances by reading from a book by an “up-and-coming poet” discovered in her dorm room. Squinting at the page, she passes off the poems as her own and receives an ovation. For the seminar, she uses the game of erasures, the story’s title, by having students take a paper from their backpacks and delete words and phrases. What’s left is a kind of found poem. Sandra thinks of them as “sly alternatives” to the pages in question.
When she returns home, she goes to her ex’s house on Bowen Street to retrieve her son. She unlocks the door and finds the house empty, barren of furniture, including the dresser with the clothes the boy won’t wear. The only thing left is her laptop with a message on it from her ex: “I DO MEAN TO HURT YOU.”
For many writers, that irony might serve as the last line of the story, the vacant house a twist on all the stealing that has taken place, the word “hurt” a revelation of Sandra’s obtuseness in thinking she has not meant to hurt her husband and son. But Frucht takes that irony a step further, with Sandra staring myopically at the line as if it is a poem: “Even blind she can tell it’s not such a great poem.” In the final sentence she deletes it.
Until the concluding paragraphs, the story appeared to be about a woman overcoming logistical handicaps, but the real issue of the piece is Sandra’s blindness to her own life and all the meaning she has erased.
“Erasures” is symptomatic of the stories in The Bell at the End of a Rope, unsettling because their edge suggests something is very wrong beyond what the characters think is wrong. They are missing the true danger, the dysfunction, madness, death, and even murder that lurk beneath the surface. These revelations and the various ways the stories get to them make this a unique and distinctive collection.
SHJ Issue 7
Spring 2013
Walter Cummins
is the co-publisher of Serving House Books and a faculty member in Fairleigh Dickinson University’s MFA in Creative Writing Program. His most recent short story collection, The End of the Circle, was published in 2010.
Cummins has published more than 100 stories in such magazines as Kansas Quarterly, Other Voices, Crosscurrents, Florida Review, South Carolina Review, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Virginia Quarterly Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Arabesques, and Confrontation, and on the Internet. He also has published memoirs, essays, articles, and reviews.
April 16, 2013
Tangled up in Blue, or, lines found in house
from Edward Beauclerk Maurice's The Last Gentleman Adventurer, Coming of Age in the Arctic: This book, beautifully published in this country by Houghton Mifflin, is a journal about the author's station at the Hudson Bay Company in the early 1930's. He left England when he was just seventeen.
Apparently, Savik had recently taken to spending the night propped up on the sleeping platform beside Annawa and his wife. This it itself was distracting enough to prevent them from getting a good night's sleep, but to make matters worse, Savik had now begun to sing whenever he suspected that the couple was about to engage in a marital embrace. The song, if such it could be called, was a long recitation of the more dubious aspects of Annawa's sexual affairs, delivered in a droning monotone.
My immediate reaction was to burst into laughter, but managing to suppress this impulse under cover of a coughing fit, I attempted to appear seriously concerned about the man's dilemma. He as unable to offer any explanation as to why Savik should behave like this, but I promised to give the matter some thought, while privately deciding to question some of the other people as to the real cause of the upset.
I had found that the Eskimo women were often readier to discuss domestic situations than the men, so I asked Innuk whether she knew why Savik should be subjecting Annawa to this treatment. She was silent for some moments as she considered what she should say very carefully, then said, "The men had agreed to change wives, but one of the women has gone away."
Apparently, Savik had recently taken to spending the night propped up on the sleeping platform beside Annawa and his wife. This it itself was distracting enough to prevent them from getting a good night's sleep, but to make matters worse, Savik had now begun to sing whenever he suspected that the couple was about to engage in a marital embrace. The song, if such it could be called, was a long recitation of the more dubious aspects of Annawa's sexual affairs, delivered in a droning monotone.
My immediate reaction was to burst into laughter, but managing to suppress this impulse under cover of a coughing fit, I attempted to appear seriously concerned about the man's dilemma. He as unable to offer any explanation as to why Savik should behave like this, but I promised to give the matter some thought, while privately deciding to question some of the other people as to the real cause of the upset.
I had found that the Eskimo women were often readier to discuss domestic situations than the men, so I asked Innuk whether she knew why Savik should be subjecting Annawa to this treatment. She was silent for some moments as she considered what she should say very carefully, then said, "The men had agreed to change wives, but one of the women has gone away."
April 4, 2013
Tangled up in Blue, or, lines found in house
This too is from 800 years of Women's Letters, which was found, by the way, in the front tier of books on the bottom (puppy accessible) shelf in the bedroom. The only book that the puppy has eaten so far is Rick Bass's memoir, Colter, The True Story of the Best Dog I Ever Had, which reminds me of Christmas, when the dogs without fail unwrap just their own presents. Anyway, from 800 years,this is Lady Mary Wortley Montagu writing to her son in 1753:
You have given me a great deal of satisfaction by your account of your eldest daughter. I am particularly pleased that she is a good arithmetician... the knowledge of numbers is one of the chief distinctions between us and brutes... Learning, if she has a real taste for it, will not only make her contented, but happy in it. No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting... To render this amusement complete, she should be permitted to learn the languages. I have heard it lamented that boys lose so many years in the mere learning of words: this is no objection to a girl; she cannot advance herself in any profession,and has therefor more hours to spare. There are two cautions to be given on this subject: first, not to think herself learned, when she can read Latin, or even Greek. Languages are more properly to be called vehicles of learning than learning itself, as may be observed in many schoolmasters, who, though perhaps critics in grammar, are the most ignorant fellows on earth.
You have given me a great deal of satisfaction by your account of your eldest daughter. I am particularly pleased that she is a good arithmetician... the knowledge of numbers is one of the chief distinctions between us and brutes... Learning, if she has a real taste for it, will not only make her contented, but happy in it. No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting... To render this amusement complete, she should be permitted to learn the languages. I have heard it lamented that boys lose so many years in the mere learning of words: this is no objection to a girl; she cannot advance herself in any profession,and has therefor more hours to spare. There are two cautions to be given on this subject: first, not to think herself learned, when she can read Latin, or even Greek. Languages are more properly to be called vehicles of learning than learning itself, as may be observed in many schoolmasters, who, though perhaps critics in grammar, are the most ignorant fellows on earth.
April 3, 2013
Tangled up in Blue, or, lines found in house
My bookshelves at home are voluminous (no pun intended) but entirely disorganized (maybe because my ex used to insist on alphabetization). Chuck and I have bookshelves in the bedroom (two deep), in the hallway, in the upstairs closets, in both studies, in the basement, in the kitchen pantry,and on a giant arc of shelves he constructed in the tv room, books that come from 1. my old house, 2. his old house, 3. his dad's old house, 4. my two sons' education as well as from their (and my) childhoods. I was looking randomly around this morning and had the distinct pleasure of coming upon books that I suddenly want to read right now, one of which I've read many times before but decades ago (The Brothers Grimm) and one I've dipped into a couple of times and shelved a couple of times and forgotten about a couple of times (800 Years of Women's Letters, edited by Olga Kenyon with a forward by P.D. James.)
From now on I will use this blog to search among our shelves for single lines or passages, today's being, from 800 Years, Florence Nightingale writing to her father,who supported her, against the wishes of her mother, in her Social Work:
In a difficult life (and mine has been more difficult than most) it is always better to clearly decide for oneself
what grievances one bear being unavoidable, what grievances one will escape from, what grievances one will try to remove. You have mentioned and do mention to me the perpetual grievance it is to you to have such expenses in the female part of your family...London...they say they do it on my account. I will just once, say it is not so. You say they have spent four months in London last year. Did they stay in London on my account when i was in Russia? If they did so it must have been to buy me one bonnet.
From now on I will use this blog to search among our shelves for single lines or passages, today's being, from 800 Years, Florence Nightingale writing to her father,who supported her, against the wishes of her mother, in her Social Work:
In a difficult life (and mine has been more difficult than most) it is always better to clearly decide for oneself
what grievances one bear being unavoidable, what grievances one will escape from, what grievances one will try to remove. You have mentioned and do mention to me the perpetual grievance it is to you to have such expenses in the female part of your family...London...they say they do it on my account. I will just once, say it is not so. You say they have spent four months in London last year. Did they stay in London on my account when i was in Russia? If they did so it must have been to buy me one bonnet.
April 2, 2013
interviews, The Bell at the End of A Rope
Here are two interviews of me pertaining to my new collection of stories, The Bell at the End of A Rope. I'm always perplexed by the question about the strangeness of my characters, and I wonder how you feel about my answers. Do you agree that my stories reflect the strangeness of real people and the unexpected and sometimes inexplicable events of real life, or do you think that they exaggerate them?
From Caroline Leavitt's blog, carolineleavittville:
I knew and loved Abby Frucht's work before I knew and loved her. Fruit of the Month, Licorice, Are You Mine?, Life Before Death, Polly's Ghost--all are books that are dog-eared from rereading. Abby's won two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, A New Voice Award from Quality Paperback Club, and several citations for notable books from the New York Times. She also teaches in the MFA Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. I'm so jazzed to have Abby here on the blog today. Her new collection The Bell at The End of a Rope is spectacular--and so is she. Thank you, Abby.
Caroline:What I loved so much about this collection was the strange, eerie quality, that reminded me of your novel Life Before Death. So I have to ask about your world view. Have you always seen the weird side of life?
Abby:When I first read this question I thought: What she’s really asking is, Am I strange? (Caroline: For the record, I adore Abby and I gravitate to these things, so this question is actually a high compliment.) So I asked some of the people who know me best, “On a scale of one to five, with five being the strangest and one being the most normal, how strange am I?”
My friend Kathleen, who I love FOR her strangeness, rated me a 1.
“You’re not strange at all!” she said. “You’re a great mother, you have a good job, you dress well, you drive safely (I was in the process of driving her to Madison when she said this, she being not a safe driver at all,) and you’re a great friend. You even came up with a name for my new stuffed pink dog.”
I next asked my son Jess, whom I admire for his groundedness, his reasoned forthrightness, and his ability to tell me roughly how much money my ex husband has made in the stock market. He rated me a 4, citing what he called my intelligence and my “unfilteredness.” Because “Unfilteredness” is not a word he ordinarily uses, I assume it emerged from a conversation he had with his fiancée last week after I met her parents for the first time.
When I asked my son Alex, who is unusual in several ineffable ways, he said promptly that I am a 3.8, but when I asked him to explain, he said, “I don’t know,” and, knowing him well enough to know that if I asked again, he would only grow impatient with our telephone call, I didn’t ask again, after which he promptly surprised me by asking when I was coming to visit.
Finally I asked Chuck, with whom I have lived for twelve years.
“You’re not strange,” he said.
“What do mean I’m not strange?” I said.
“Oh. Would you rather I said you were?” he said.
I pretended I didn’t hear that question, and he didn’t ask it a second time.
The only other way that I can answer this question is that it always interests me when people respond to what they call the weird things in my stories, since, to me, a lot of the things aren’t weird at all, they’re normal. My sister Liz understood this best when she rated me a 3, explaining that most people are 3’s because most people are weird. I aruged that didn’t make sense, because if everybody were a 3, being weird and being normal would be identical, to which she said, “Yeah, that’s what I’m saying.”
Caroline: You’ve written both short stories and novels--is the process different for you? Do you prefer one of the other? Or since, these wonderful stories are all sort of linked thematically, does it feel like writing a longer piece of work?
Abby: Aside from the stories all having something to do with childhood, the links didn’t make themselves known to me until just a few years ago when I began to compile them into a book, at which time I realized that my childhood neighborhood and many of my childhood friends, neighbors, babysitters, family members and pastimes were included in them. Once I realized that these links were present, I played them up a little in revision, not in hopes of creating a book of linked stories, since of course this book is not, but rather to bring myself, and my reader, nearer emotionally to the world out of which the stories emerged. They were written over a period of nearly twenty years, during which time I wrote three novels which have nothing to do with each other. I don’t have a preference as to writing novels or writing stories. It’s an equal opportunity struggle for me to write one or the other, and there is equal enjoyment.. What I DO enjoy struggling most over are the individual sentences, no matter of what they are a part.
Caroline: The collection is so unexpectedly funny even as it deals with really serious issues--the death of a spouse, for example. But I also love the language. In Choir practice, Emily signs her letter “your fateful friend,” which is actually more accurate than if she had used the word faithful. Have you always been attuned to the frisky possibility of language?
Abby: The other day I asked Chuck if he could explain the meaning to me of a dream I had had the night before. I loved the dream and was scared by it but I didn’t have a clue what it meant. I told him that in the dream we were walking in a place that is like most of the places in the dreams I have been having lately, a place both inside and outside, a forested, verdant landscape studded with architectural elements like columns and archways and doorways guarded by rabbits. In this particular dream, Chuck and I were walking, and a beautiful but unfamiliar wild creature that in the dream was understood to be a lion kept leaping out at me and nibbling gently at my hand, and when I looked at my hand there was a large, gaping hole in it that went all the way through to the other side, but it didn’t hurt and there was no blood.
Chuck said, That’s easy. You were dreaming about Ike.
Ike was our dog who died a few months ago. He was a golden retriever. He looked like a lion, and I often used to say to him, “You’re a ly’in on the bed!” or “You’re a ly’in on the floor!” He made me and Chuck whole, but now that he’s gone there is a hole in us.
When I used to cry, Ike always came up and sat near me. The foster dog we now have is at this moment entirely oblivious to my crying, and she is not a ly’in on the pillow. She is a foster dog on a pillow. This doesn’t mean that I won’t someday fall in love with her, Chuck says…and when I tell her I love her, she believes that I do, and at this point, that’s what matters.
Caroline:I want to ask about your publisher, Narrative Library, which is part of Narrative Magazine--which I love. Their tagline is “storytelling in the digital age.” So, I have to ask, what was the experience like and how did it differ from working with traditional publishers?
Abby: Editorially, the experience I’ve been having with Narrative Library is every bit as good and as warm as the best of my editorial experiences with more conventional presses. The people at Narrative have been on top of everything and have taken me through five or six readings with three different people. They’re really in it for the labor of love aspect…and they would be the first to admit that they can offer comparatively little by way of conventional distribution and sales, which is something I’m happy enough to live with, given that I haven’t ever made a sales splash anyway. Since they’re in it for the love, and since I am too, I know that we won’t disappoint each other.
Caroline:What’s obsessing you now and why?
Abby: My sister, Sylvia was just named a judge by the governor of New Mexico (The reason I didn’t ask her to rate my strangeness is because she’s in the middle of all that right now) and what’s obsessing me is precisely how I will make it to the swearing-in ceremony and still make the trip I was supposed to take with Chuck and his son and daughter-in-law before going to teach in Vermont this winter. I WILL manage, I’m sure, but I hate logistics and making travel arrangements and thus I tend to obsess over them. Other than that, physical exercise is always at the top of my list.
Caroline:What question didn't I ask that I should have?
Abby: As Alex might say, there are 3.8 of them but I don’t know what they are.
and, from an interview with the Oshkosh Public Library:
1. You write both short story collections and novels: Do you enjoy writing one type more than the other and why?
Novels and stories aren't as different from each other as they might appear. Both give the writer the chance to dramatize worldly issues and events by observing them through the actions of individuals, and both give the writer the chance to telescope out in the other direction, the way poetry does, looking at quiet, personal moments in order to contemplate people in general. I like doing both. It doesn't necessarily take a longer span of time to complete a short story than a novel. I revised some of the stories in The Bell at the End of A Rope over years. It's hard to tell, sometimes, whether I am writing stories in between writing novels or the other way around.
2. You’ve written numerous books – of which are you the most proud?
Right now I'm most proud of the novel I've been writing with my colleague at Vermont College of Fine Arts, Laurie Alberts, so the pride I have is for her, too, and for the fact that after three years of Skyping, arguing, driving around looking for settings, and rewriting each other's sentences so often that we can't remember which of us wrote them first, we're even better friends now than we were before.
3.I've seen your characters in Bell at the End of a Ropedescribed as “bizarre and endearing;” the stories as “funny and dark." Why do you choose to create characters that sound like they are anything but ordinary?
Most real people, even those who might be called "ordinary," are strange in their own ways, and life itself IS dark and funny.
4. For those who have not read any of your books, why should they give them a try?
Rather than sell my book here I'd rather encourage an interest in fiction, period. Anybody who doesn't read fiction should give fiction a try no matter who wrote it.
From Caroline Leavitt's blog, carolineleavittville:
I knew and loved Abby Frucht's work before I knew and loved her. Fruit of the Month, Licorice, Are You Mine?, Life Before Death, Polly's Ghost--all are books that are dog-eared from rereading. Abby's won two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, A New Voice Award from Quality Paperback Club, and several citations for notable books from the New York Times. She also teaches in the MFA Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. I'm so jazzed to have Abby here on the blog today. Her new collection The Bell at The End of a Rope is spectacular--and so is she. Thank you, Abby.
Caroline:What I loved so much about this collection was the strange, eerie quality, that reminded me of your novel Life Before Death. So I have to ask about your world view. Have you always seen the weird side of life?
Abby:When I first read this question I thought: What she’s really asking is, Am I strange? (Caroline: For the record, I adore Abby and I gravitate to these things, so this question is actually a high compliment.) So I asked some of the people who know me best, “On a scale of one to five, with five being the strangest and one being the most normal, how strange am I?”
My friend Kathleen, who I love FOR her strangeness, rated me a 1.
“You’re not strange at all!” she said. “You’re a great mother, you have a good job, you dress well, you drive safely (I was in the process of driving her to Madison when she said this, she being not a safe driver at all,) and you’re a great friend. You even came up with a name for my new stuffed pink dog.”
I next asked my son Jess, whom I admire for his groundedness, his reasoned forthrightness, and his ability to tell me roughly how much money my ex husband has made in the stock market. He rated me a 4, citing what he called my intelligence and my “unfilteredness.” Because “Unfilteredness” is not a word he ordinarily uses, I assume it emerged from a conversation he had with his fiancée last week after I met her parents for the first time.
When I asked my son Alex, who is unusual in several ineffable ways, he said promptly that I am a 3.8, but when I asked him to explain, he said, “I don’t know,” and, knowing him well enough to know that if I asked again, he would only grow impatient with our telephone call, I didn’t ask again, after which he promptly surprised me by asking when I was coming to visit.
Finally I asked Chuck, with whom I have lived for twelve years.
“You’re not strange,” he said.
“What do mean I’m not strange?” I said.
“Oh. Would you rather I said you were?” he said.
I pretended I didn’t hear that question, and he didn’t ask it a second time.
The only other way that I can answer this question is that it always interests me when people respond to what they call the weird things in my stories, since, to me, a lot of the things aren’t weird at all, they’re normal. My sister Liz understood this best when she rated me a 3, explaining that most people are 3’s because most people are weird. I aruged that didn’t make sense, because if everybody were a 3, being weird and being normal would be identical, to which she said, “Yeah, that’s what I’m saying.”
Caroline: You’ve written both short stories and novels--is the process different for you? Do you prefer one of the other? Or since, these wonderful stories are all sort of linked thematically, does it feel like writing a longer piece of work?
Abby: Aside from the stories all having something to do with childhood, the links didn’t make themselves known to me until just a few years ago when I began to compile them into a book, at which time I realized that my childhood neighborhood and many of my childhood friends, neighbors, babysitters, family members and pastimes were included in them. Once I realized that these links were present, I played them up a little in revision, not in hopes of creating a book of linked stories, since of course this book is not, but rather to bring myself, and my reader, nearer emotionally to the world out of which the stories emerged. They were written over a period of nearly twenty years, during which time I wrote three novels which have nothing to do with each other. I don’t have a preference as to writing novels or writing stories. It’s an equal opportunity struggle for me to write one or the other, and there is equal enjoyment.. What I DO enjoy struggling most over are the individual sentences, no matter of what they are a part.
Caroline: The collection is so unexpectedly funny even as it deals with really serious issues--the death of a spouse, for example. But I also love the language. In Choir practice, Emily signs her letter “your fateful friend,” which is actually more accurate than if she had used the word faithful. Have you always been attuned to the frisky possibility of language?
Abby: The other day I asked Chuck if he could explain the meaning to me of a dream I had had the night before. I loved the dream and was scared by it but I didn’t have a clue what it meant. I told him that in the dream we were walking in a place that is like most of the places in the dreams I have been having lately, a place both inside and outside, a forested, verdant landscape studded with architectural elements like columns and archways and doorways guarded by rabbits. In this particular dream, Chuck and I were walking, and a beautiful but unfamiliar wild creature that in the dream was understood to be a lion kept leaping out at me and nibbling gently at my hand, and when I looked at my hand there was a large, gaping hole in it that went all the way through to the other side, but it didn’t hurt and there was no blood.
Chuck said, That’s easy. You were dreaming about Ike.
Ike was our dog who died a few months ago. He was a golden retriever. He looked like a lion, and I often used to say to him, “You’re a ly’in on the bed!” or “You’re a ly’in on the floor!” He made me and Chuck whole, but now that he’s gone there is a hole in us.
When I used to cry, Ike always came up and sat near me. The foster dog we now have is at this moment entirely oblivious to my crying, and she is not a ly’in on the pillow. She is a foster dog on a pillow. This doesn’t mean that I won’t someday fall in love with her, Chuck says…and when I tell her I love her, she believes that I do, and at this point, that’s what matters.
Caroline:I want to ask about your publisher, Narrative Library, which is part of Narrative Magazine--which I love. Their tagline is “storytelling in the digital age.” So, I have to ask, what was the experience like and how did it differ from working with traditional publishers?
Abby: Editorially, the experience I’ve been having with Narrative Library is every bit as good and as warm as the best of my editorial experiences with more conventional presses. The people at Narrative have been on top of everything and have taken me through five or six readings with three different people. They’re really in it for the labor of love aspect…and they would be the first to admit that they can offer comparatively little by way of conventional distribution and sales, which is something I’m happy enough to live with, given that I haven’t ever made a sales splash anyway. Since they’re in it for the love, and since I am too, I know that we won’t disappoint each other.
Caroline:What’s obsessing you now and why?
Abby: My sister, Sylvia was just named a judge by the governor of New Mexico (The reason I didn’t ask her to rate my strangeness is because she’s in the middle of all that right now) and what’s obsessing me is precisely how I will make it to the swearing-in ceremony and still make the trip I was supposed to take with Chuck and his son and daughter-in-law before going to teach in Vermont this winter. I WILL manage, I’m sure, but I hate logistics and making travel arrangements and thus I tend to obsess over them. Other than that, physical exercise is always at the top of my list.
Caroline:What question didn't I ask that I should have?
Abby: As Alex might say, there are 3.8 of them but I don’t know what they are.
and, from an interview with the Oshkosh Public Library:
1. You write both short story collections and novels: Do you enjoy writing one type more than the other and why?
Novels and stories aren't as different from each other as they might appear. Both give the writer the chance to dramatize worldly issues and events by observing them through the actions of individuals, and both give the writer the chance to telescope out in the other direction, the way poetry does, looking at quiet, personal moments in order to contemplate people in general. I like doing both. It doesn't necessarily take a longer span of time to complete a short story than a novel. I revised some of the stories in The Bell at the End of A Rope over years. It's hard to tell, sometimes, whether I am writing stories in between writing novels or the other way around.
2. You’ve written numerous books – of which are you the most proud?
Right now I'm most proud of the novel I've been writing with my colleague at Vermont College of Fine Arts, Laurie Alberts, so the pride I have is for her, too, and for the fact that after three years of Skyping, arguing, driving around looking for settings, and rewriting each other's sentences so often that we can't remember which of us wrote them first, we're even better friends now than we were before.
3.I've seen your characters in Bell at the End of a Ropedescribed as “bizarre and endearing;” the stories as “funny and dark." Why do you choose to create characters that sound like they are anything but ordinary?
Most real people, even those who might be called "ordinary," are strange in their own ways, and life itself IS dark and funny.
4. For those who have not read any of your books, why should they give them a try?
Rather than sell my book here I'd rather encourage an interest in fiction, period. Anybody who doesn't read fiction should give fiction a try no matter who wrote it.
